Here’s How To Actually Reverse The Baby Bust
The best way to promote fertility isn’t funding parenthood. It’s stopping the government programs that discourage people from having babies.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently identified three key drivers of the "civilizational suicide" underway in the West: a "parasitic mindset," climate alarmism, and false religion.
Musk noted midway through his interview with the titular host of the Tucker Carlson Network that while leftist billionaire George Soros is "senile," he has bequeathed a powerful nongovernmental system to his son Alexander Soros and other "like-minded people" who may continue his "anti-civilizational" campaign of normalizing criminality and dismantling borders.
While open borders and unchecked crime are certainly ruinous, Musk intimated that they are merely symptoms of a greater civilizational sickness — a sickness that leaves the body politic tolerating the Open Society Foundations' agenda, spurns life, mutates empathy, and glorifies an unmanned nature.
When asked to assess the current state of Europe, Musk bemoaned the collapse of birthrates.
"My biggest concern for Europe is that their birth rate is half replacement rate," said Musk. "So Europe is rapidly becoming with each passing year older and older with fewer and fewer young people. ... At the most fundamental level, unless Europe has a birth rate at least roughly equal to replacement rate, it is in population free fall, population collapse."
'Their main sort of domestic social policy is convincing you not to have kids.'
In May, a peer-reviewed study published in the Lancet revealed that fertility rates have declined in all countries and territories since 1950 and that "human civilization is rapidly converging on a sustained low-fertility reality."
The fertility rate references the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime. The replacement rate Musk referenced is 2.1. This is necessary for a population to maintain stability and replenish itself without requiring replacement by foreign nationals.
Blaze News previously reported that in 1950, the global fertility rate was 4.84. In 2021, it was 2.23. By the end of the 2100s, it is expected to drop to 1.59 globally.
The average fertility rate for the European Union as a whole in 2022 was 1.46. Italy and Spain were among the European nations with the lowest rates — 1.24 and 1.16, respectively.
While Europe is on the greased track to collapse, Carlson reflected on the situation stateside, noting, "It does seem like the U.S. government — if you take three steps back — is pretty committed to making fewer Americans. There's a lot of anti-fertility propaganda. Actually, that seems like their main sort of domestic social policy is convincing you not to have kids."
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the general fertility rate in the U.S. reached a historic low of 1.61 in 2023. By way of contrast, in 1960, the U.S. fertility rate was 3.7.
Despite these staggering statistics, the Biden-Harris administration has continued championing the slaughter of the unborn and the effective sterilization of vulnerable populations while Democratic lawmakers work to dissuade some young couples from becoming parents.
A big driver of Western anti-natalism in recent years has been climate alarmism.
Morgan Stanley analysts told investors in 2021 that the "movement to not have children owing to fears over climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline."
'It's infecting people and making it impossible for them to make rational decisions.'
"The environmental movement in the extreme is fundamentally misanthropic and anti-human," Musk told Carlson. "They start seeing humans as a plague, a blight on the surface of the earth — that earth would be this paradise if only the humans weren't here."
Musk noted that some climate alarmists are forthright about their desire to see humanity destroyed in a massive "holocaust," whereas others have not admitted as much out loud or to themselves.
"A lot of people believe that the earth can't sustain this level of human population, which is utterly untrue. It may seem that in a crowded city there are a lot of people, but actually, if you look down in an airplane and say, 'Am I over a person at any given point in time?' when you're in an airplane, the answer ... 99.9% of the time is 'no.'"
Musk emphasized that the world is in fact underpopulated and that the suggestion to the contrary was the result, in part, of the successful anti-human depopulationist propaganda advanced by biologist Paul Ehrlich.
Despite having had the primary claim in his magnum opus proven wrong by real-world trends, Ehrlich doubled down on his anti-human mania in a "60 Minutes" interview last year, stressing the world has "too many people."
Musk said, "I hope he burns in hell, that guy. Seriously. Terrible human being."
After Musk highlighted that amidst the West's activist-supported population collapse, leftist governments — particularly the Starmer government in Britain — are actively censoring those who would dare criticize the native population's replacement and sporadic rape by immigrants, Carlson said, "You've used the phrase 'mind virus,' but it's behaving like a virus. It's infecting people and making it impossible for them to make rational decisions."
Musk recommended the work of evolutionary behavioral scientist Gad Saad, who has argued that the West "has been parasitized by a set of idea pathogens that negate reality and common sense."
Saad noted last year in the National Post that chief among all idea pathogens now plaguing the West is postmodernism:
It is a form of intellectual terrorism as it posits that there are no objective truths since apparently all truth claims are tainted by subjective relativism and personal biases. Postmodernism opens the door to questioning the 'antiquated' reality of what constitutes a man and a woman. Until fifteen minutes ago, the 117 billion people who had ever lived, as a sexually reproducing species, knew exactly how to identify these two phenotypes. This is no longer true.
The other pathogenic ideas Saad suggested are now crippling the West are the "DIE cult (diversity, inclusion, and equity)," cultural relativism, and suicidal empathy.
Saad noted that suicidal empathy is what animates that class of people who would excuse the illegal entry of criminal noncitizens into the homeland despite their track record of preying upon the citizen population.
'The woke mind virus — it takes the place of religion.'
"Progressives are driven by misplaced and hyperactive faux empathy," wrote Saad. "According to the tenets of progressivism, criminals are victims of society. Hence, to severely punish them for their acts presumes that they have personal agency."
Musk contrasted the kind of "deep empathy" that would entail a desire to see civilization thrive and continue with this shallow or "suicidal empathy," which he suggested "results in the destruction of civilization."
According to Musk, there is a link between the implantation and spread of this parasitic mindset and the decline of religion.
"Nature abhors a vacuum. So when you have essentially a decline in religion and increase in the secular nature of society, for most people, they need something to fill that void, so they adopt a religion. It's not called a religion," said Musk. "The woke mind virus — it takes the place of religion, and they internalize and they feel it with religious fervor."
Musk indicated that the adherents of this woke pseudo-religion then wage a "holy war."
Blaze News recently discussed the implications of America's de-Christianization with Dr. Joshua Mitchell, professor of political theory at Georgetown University.
'Identity politics is the latest iteration of an incomplete religion.'
Mitchell, whose thesis in "American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time" pre-empted Musk's realization by a few years, indicated that identity politics has absorbed much of the attention and energy previously invested into traditional religions.
"So when the Pew Charitable Trusts notes that American church attendance is going down, I say, 'You don't know where to look,'" said Mitchell. "If we call religion 'institutionalized Christianity,' well, then of course the numbers are going down. But if we call religion 'the search for a way to think through purity and stain, innocent victimhood, and historical sin in order to find atonement,' then in America today we're having a religious revival."
Mitchell borrowed a term from Alexis de Tocqueville to describe the woke pseudo-religion Musk recently identified:
We didn't move from Christianity to a secular world. We moved from one incomplete version of Christianity — complete with a designated innocent victim and a moral economy that says who's purified and who’s damned — to the next. Identity politics is the latest iteration of an incomplete religion.
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Biologist Paul Ehrlich, 91, and other de-populationists have long concern-mongered about the planet having far too many human beings living on it. Their alarmist claims have proven as consequential as they have been wrong, inspiring the kind of disastrous policies taken up by the communist Chinese regime, which massacred hundreds of millions of babies as a result of its one-child policy.
It turns out the problem the species actually faces is not a population boom but rather a world-changing population crunch.
A new peer-reviewed study published in the Lancet recently revealed that fertility rates have declined in all countries and territories since 1950 and that "human civilization is rapidly converging on a sustained low-fertility reality."
The fertility rate references the average number of children born to a woman in her lifetime. In 1950, the global fertility rate was 4.84. In 2021, it was 2.23. By the end of this century, it is expected to drop to 1.59 globally.
For a population to maintain stability and replenish itself without need for an influx of foreign nationals, a fertility rate of 2.1 is needed.
The fertility rate in the U.S. last year was 1.784. By way of contrast, in 1960, the U.S. fertility rate was 3.7. The American fertility rate predicted for 2100 is 1.45, according to the study.
"Only six of 204 countries and territories (Samoa, Somalia, Tonga, Niger, Chad, and Tajikistan) are projected to have above-replacement levels of fertility by 2100, and only 26 will still have a positive rate of natural increase (i.e., the number of births will exceed the numbers of deaths)," wrote the researchers.
The researchers drew these conclusions on the basis of up-to-date assessments of key fertility indicators from 1950 to 2021 along with the forecast fertility metrics to 2100 produced in the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation's Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2021, executed at the University of Washington School of Medicine.
The impact of this demographic trend outlined in the study has already shaken up countries such as China and Japan. The consequences will continue to magnify across the world in the coming decades, lest there be some grand about-face.
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According to the study, the world will become increasingly divided in terms of age demographics. The West and Asia are poised to thin out and turn increasingly gray, while parts of sub-Saharan Africa will remain relatively youthful.
The greater ratio of old people to young people in low-fertility countries is "likely to present considerable economic challenges caused by a growing dependency ratio of older to working-age population and a shrinking labor force," reported the study.
The researchers indicated that barring new funding sources or "unforeseen innovations," national health insurance and social security programs along with health-care infrastructure will be overwhelmed.
In addition to straining health and welfare systems, increasingly childless societies are likely to also suffer economically.
"If productivity per working-aged adult does not increase in accordance with declines in the working-age population, growth in gross domestic product will slow," said the study. "Reliance on immigrants will become increasingly necessary to sustain economic growth in low-fertility countries."
The study suggested that reliance on immigrants from those lower-income countries that still bother to have kids will increase as post-industrialized nations attempt to address labor shortages. However, this reliance may adversely impact the migrants' native countries, which lose out on the skilled labor and talent pursuing better pay abroad.
Despite the civilizational collapse underway, the researchers behind this Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation-funded study highlighted what climate alarmists and other de-populationists might regard as a silver lining, stating, "Although sustained below-replacement fertility will pose serious potential challenges for much of the world over the course of the century, it also presents opportunities for environmental progress."
An increasingly old and childless world "could alleviate some strain on global food systems, fragile environments, and other finite resources, and also reduce carbon emissions," wrote the researchers.
The study suggested that pro-natal policies such as child-related cash transfers, tax incentives, childcare subsidies, extended parental leave, and other supports for family — such as those rolled out in Viktor Orbán's Hungary and now being considered in South Korea — might help arrest or slow the fertility decline. However, "There are few data to show that such polices have led to strong, sustained rebounds in fertility."
The Atlantic noted that pro-natal policies have proven successful in certain cases. For instance, the Czech Republic saw its birth rate bottom out in the 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In the mid-2000s, the government began doling out $10,000 to parents for every child, the equivalent of what many citizens were making yearly after taxes.
Tomáš Sobotka, a researcher at Austria’s Vienna Institute of Demography, told the Atlantic that the Czech Republic's pro-natal policy apparently worked as there was a corresponding increase in births over time, and more families were having second and third children.
"Even under optimistic assumptions on the impact of pro-natal policies based on current data, global [total fertility rate] will remain low — and well below replacement level — up to 2100," said the study. "Nevertheless, our pro-natal scenario forecasts also suggest that pro-natal policies might prevent some countries from dropping below very-low (<1·6 TFR) or the lowest-low (<1·3 TFR) fertility in the future."
The researchers did not mention possible cultural or spiritual remedies but did recommend against restricting access to abortion, which kills more than 70 million babies a year worldwide.
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Climate alarmists are becoming increasingly forthright about their hostility toward human life.
Donnachadh McCarthy, a failed politician involved in Just Stop Oil and one of the leading figures of Extinction Rebellion, recently went on British television to peddle depopulationist solutions to imagined problems. McCarthy suggested to GB News — just weeks after calling for Israeli forces to surrender — that "there is a moral issue" with having too many children and that families should be limited to one child.
When China adopted as policy the voluntary scheme McCarthy proposed Tuesday, it ended up with a half-billion dead children, a devastating sex ratio imbalance, and a demographic crisis. It's clear, however, that a similar population collapse is precisely what McCarthy and other alarmists want for the West.
McCarthy — who has previously shared a stage with photo opportunist Greta Thunberg — made clear that he regards children as mobile pollutants, citing disputed statistics as evidence.
"Every child in an industrial country like ours has around 505 hundred tonnes of carbon over their lifetime," said McCarthy, who has himself fed plants with his carbon dioxide for over 64 years. "That's equivalent to 1,000 years of electricity for a household. So each child has an impact, and we're saying one is great, two is plenty, and three is selfish."
McCarthy made clear that he is not only concerned about procreation in Western nations like the United Kingdom — which accounts for less than 1% of global carbon dioxide emissions. He similarly bemoaned the British government's apparent failure to do more to help the developing world abort its young.
"When women have access to family planning, rights to work and a right to education, the birth rate falls naturally," he said. "What I think is tragic is that the U.K. government have cut funds for girls in the developing world, and I think that is sad."
McCarthy appears to have been referring to the U.K.'s 2022 reduction in funding for foreign abortions, euphemistically referred to as sexual and reproductive health rights, by nearly a third.
The climate alarmist has long been a proponent of abortion, claiming that the pro-life position of the "patriarchal Abrahamic religions ... is a stain on human progress."
Despite his apparent desire to have the human population reined in, McCarthy's group Extinction Rebellion elsewhere claims to be a movement for the young dedicated to combating a system "contemptuous of humanity."
Nicole Ratcliff, a parenting coach on the GB News panel with McCarthy, said in response to the radical's depopulationist rhetoric, "I am one of four. I'm sorry, we've got a lovely family, and the idea that three is selfish is shocking."
"For me, I think if someone is choosing not to have children because of climate change, that is not somebody who is driven to have them," said Ratcliff. "The need to have children is something that is built within us, and if you are somebody that wants to have them, then you can't switch that urge off."
"There are people out there pending every single penny that they have got to have a child, and if they are made to feel guilty they are contributing to climate change — I feel quite offended by the idea that bringing a much-loved child into the world would be a bad thing to do," added Ratcliff.
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Like other radicals, McCarthy's climate hysteria has not only pitted him against big, happy families, but also againstdaily showers, affordable energy, holiday flights, road trips, water hoses, critics of communist China, meat, and pet ownership.
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China's aspirations of seeing its hundred-year marathon through to displacing the U.S. and becoming global hegemon by 2049 are growing increasingly fantastical. The economic and social problems the Asian nation faced in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic have not gone away. Rather, things have continued to deteriorate.
China faces a worsening demographic crisis, due in part to the Chinese Communist Party's one-child policy as well as to other correlated factors such as a decrease in the number of women of childbearing age, higher suicide rates in women than in men, sex-selective abortion, and declining fertility.
The birth rate was over 20 births per 1,000 people in 1990, one decade after the implementation of the one-child policy. Over the next 25 years, the country saw a precipitous decline in the birth rate, which a two-child policy in 2016 was unable to arrest. The rate hit a record low of 7.5 births per 1,000 people in 2021.
Data released by China's National Bureau of Statistics Wednesday indicated the birth rate reached a new low in 2023 of 6.39 per 1,000 people, reported the BBC.
The country's annual population has in turn fallen for a second consecutive year, this time by an estimated 2.08 million people.
"It's not a surprise. They've got one of the lowest fertility rates in the world so this is just what happens - the population stops growing and starts to decline," Stuart Gietel-Basten, a population policy expert at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, told the BBC.
The country's fertility rate in 1950, the year after communists formally took power, was 5.29. The rate dropped to a record low of 1.16 in 2022. Blaze News previously noted that the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development regards 2.1 as the standard for a stable population.
Demographic stability has been further undermined by a sex-ratio imbalance. As of 2021, there were over 34.9 million more men than women in the country, reported Newsweek.
"It's kind of locked in now… this is just the next year in this new era of population stagnation or decline for China," added Gietel-Basten.
The demographic problem has been compounded by economic stress as many of those in China who want and can physically have children reportedly cannot afford to do so.
Data released this week revealed the Chinese economy had allegedly grown at one of the slowest rates in over 30 years. Reuters reported that China's GDP allegedly grew by 5.2% in the fourth quarter of 2023, disappointing many investors and analysts.
"Although the government met its 2023 GDP growth target of 'around 5.0%', achieving the same pace of expansion in 2024 will prove a lot more challenging," said Julian Evans-Pritchard, head of China Economics at Capital Economics.
The China Beige Book International's latest survey suggested, "Any true acceleration (this year) will require either a major global upside surprise or more active government policy."
Craig Singleton, senior China fellow at the non-partisan Foundation for Defense of Democracies, told Newsweek that the regime's latest claims about the country's GDP growth "are just not credible."
"Focusing on China's false GDP figures risks missing the forest for the tree," said Singleton. "The days of China's sky-high growth are over."
"There is no getting around the fact that China is in damage control mode, attempting to project a sense of stability to the international community while grappling with myriad domestic challenges. If ever the cliché 'investor beware' applied, it's now," added Singleton.
The country is struggling with high debt, a stock market in free fall, and a real estate crisis that continues to ravage the sector.
Reuters indicated that amid China's disputed recovery and in the face of concerns about renewed lockdowns, the jobless rate nationwide increased to 5.1% last month and unemployment among Chinese youths ages 16 to 24 also remains high.
The youth unemployment rate skyrocketed to 21.3% in June 2023, prompting the regime to suspend the release of monthly data. The rate allegedly sank to 14.1% in December, but is still high enough to create trouble for the regime, which has promised progressive increases in living standards in exchange for acceptance of its authoritarian rule.
In addition to a potentially restive, largely male youth population, China has to contend with its massive elderly population. The BBC indicated that the retiree population, placing increasing pressure on the health care and pension systems, is projected to increase by 60% to 400 million over the next 10 years.
The Guardian noted that 14% of China's population is over the age of 65 and is on track to have more geriatrics than the entire population of the United States.
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Birth rates are bottoming out in the Western world. While some might consider this demographic trend worrisome — perhaps indicative of a worsening culture of death and/or societal collapse — an Oxford academic and World Economic Forum adviser recently expressed joy, calling the prospect of fewer English babies a "good thing."
According to official figures, the number of babies born in England and Wales last year was at a two-decade low, reported the Guardian.
America similarly has seen its general fertility rate plummet to all-time lows in recent years, recording roughly 56 births per 1,000 women in 2020 — about half of what it was in the 1960s.
In addition to 51.4% of the babies being born out of wedlock, Britain's Office for National Statistics revealed that nearly one-third of babies were born to immigrants.
When pressed by the Telegraph about Britain's slipping birth rate, Sarah Harper, director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, said that fewer English babies are "good for ... our planet."
Rather than seek to replace the country's fading native population, Harper would prefer to see non-Western nations replenish the human stock.
Harper, who served on the prime minister's Council for Science and Technology between 2014 and 2017, said, "I think it's a good thing that the high-income, high-consuming countries of the world are reducing the number of children that they're having. I'm quite positive about that."
Declining fertility in countries such as Britain and the U.S. would reduce the "general overconsumption that we have at the moment," claimed Harper, glossing over not only the incredible waste and emissions of poorer countries, but the restorative technologies and initiatives launched by richer nations.
Harper further suggested to the Telegraph, "We will see smaller populations in high-income countries going forward. It's just going to be a trend of the 21st century and that will actually be good for general overall consumption that we have at the moment and our planet."
The Oxford academic appears to be partial to the depopulationist agenda advanced by the likes of anti-human American biologist Paul Ehrlich, the Club of Rome, the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, CNN founder Ted Turner, and the radical British group Population Matters.
Population Matters, which recently had Harper join as a speaker, cautions that each new human being brings with them the guarantee of carbon emissions. The depopulationists advocate for abortion and shrinking family sizes.
One patron of the group, "Planet Earth" narrator David Attenborough, has stated, "All our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people."
While Harper, Attenborough, and others don't bother disguising their revulsion for humanity, some climate alarmists, like leftist academic Robin Maynard, now couch their calls for pre-emptively erasing future generations within the rhetoric of "family planning, gender equality and education."
The impact of this anti-human propaganda, parroted by some Democrats, such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), has been significant, as the fears whipped up by climate alarmists are successfully dissuading some young couples from becoming parents, as demonstrated by a 2020 study published in the journal Climatic Change.
Morgan Stanley analysts told investors in 2021 that the "movement to not have children owing to fears over climate change is growing and impacting fertility rates quicker than any preceding trend in the field of fertility decline."
The Telegraph noted there will be fallout from the course the depopulationists wish the West to pursue. For instance, while declining birth rates may reduce consumption rates, they will also place greater strain on younger generations to pay more in tax for the health care of older generations, including Harper's.
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California is simultaneously paying reparations to those sterilized by the government in the 20th century while officially giving sanctuary to those now sterilizing minors.
The Associated Press reported that the state has approved 51 out of 310 applicants for reparations.
Unlike racial reparations programs under way in the state, this initiative is paying at least $15,000 to persons either sterilized during the so-called eugenics movement or sterilized in state prisons.
The eugenics movement, of which the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was a major proponent, sought to sterilize by force or other means. In Sanger's own words, "morons, mental defectives, epileptics," along with criminals, the poor, illiterates, and the unemployed, were unfit to breed and should therefore be precluded from doing so.
This movement was widespread, especially popular in Britain as well as in Canada. In fact, Tommy Douglas, touted as the father of socialized medicine in Canada and dubbed "Greatest Canadian," once supported the sterilization of "mental defectives and those incurable diseased."
California had the largest forced sterilization program in the United States, beginning in 1909. It victimized over 20,000 people.
According to Paul Lombardo, a law professor at Georgia State University and eugenics expert, California's practice of ensuring "human improvement by better breeding" reportedly inspired similar practices in Nazi Germany.
"The promise of eugenics at the very earliest is: 'We could do away with all the state institutions — prisons, hospitals, asylums, orphanages,'" said Lombardo. "People who were in them just wouldn’t be born after awhile if you sterilized all of their parents."
Mary Franco was one such victim of this thinking. Franco was sterilized at the age of 13 in 1934, as she was deemed "feeble minded" and a sexual deviant.
Stacy Cordova, Franco's niece, indicated that contrary to the state's suspicions, she had in fact been molested by a neighbor. Ostensibly punished by ideologues for another person's crime, Franco was denied the ability to have and raise biological children — an injustice that ruined a marriage and left her utterly alone.
California approved its reparations program for forced sterilizations in 2021, after North Carolina and Virginia had similarly done so.
While 51 have since been approved, state officials denied 103 people reparations and are processing 153 others.
The California Victims’ Compensation Board, which oversees the program, recommends on its website that to demonstrate victimhood, applicants are to provide documentation of the claimant's sterilization; sterilization recommendation; surgical consent forms; relevant court or institutional records; and/or other pertinent documentation.
Lynda Gledhill, executive officer of the Compensation Board, told the Associated Press, "We try to find all the information we can and sometimes we just have to hope that somebody maybe can find more detailed information on their own. ... We’re just sometimes not able to verify what happened."
Gledhill added, "Nothing we can do can make up for what happened to them."
While the state is finally making amends for sterilizing people "who lived in state-run hospitals, homes and institutions through 1979," it has recently become a safe haven for doctors, activists, and others who confer on minors drugs previously used to sterilize pedophiles and other sex offenders.
TheBlaze previously reported that Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed into law a bill designating California a "sanctuary" for gender-dysphoric children and teens seeking so-called "gender-affirming care."
The bill, introduced by the leftist state Sen. Scott Wiener (D) — who also introduced a bill softening punishments on LGBT adults who commit sex crimes against minors — ensures that transsexual youths can receive hormone prescriptions, puberty blockers, and genital mutilations banned in other states.
The law also "prohibits the arrest or recognition of any demand for extradition of an individual that criminalizes allowing a person to receive or provide gender-affirming health care where that conduct would not be unlawful under California’s law."
A study published on Sept. 19 in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy indicated that puberty blockers, also known as luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone agonists or GnRHa drugs, are not just creating sexless adults, although GnRHa is a drug "licensed to chemically castrate men." They are depleting victims' bone density; hampering their cognitive development; and producing a myriad of deleterious emotional effects.
According to the American College of Pediatricians, GnRHa agonists "arrest bone growth, decrease bone accretion, prevent the sex-steroid dependent organization and maturation of the adolescent brain, and inhibit fertility by preventing the development of gonadal tissue and mature gametes for the duration of treatment."
Not only is California protecting those who prescribe drugs that sterilize children whom Dr. Michael Biggs, a professor of sociology at the University of Oxford, claimed might have otherwise turned out to be sexually functional gays or lesbians, but it is also enabling clinicians and activists to endanger the lives of minors — kids who consequently may not live long enough to one day receive reparations.
The FDA noted that 6,379 people died between 2013 and June 2019 after taking the hormone blocker Lupron. There were also 41,213 adverse events and 25,645 "serious" reactions reported. Lupron is one of the drugs given to children diagnosed with gender dysphoria.
Just as Planned Parenthood was tied to eugenics in the 20th century, it is playing a leading role in the sterilization of children today.
Planned Parenthood is the second-largest provider of sterilizing hormones to transsexuals nationwide.
Biologist Paul Ehrlich, 90, has lived long enough to see his most dire predictions disproven, but evidently not long enough to reconsider his alarmist approach to demographics.
In a "60 Minutes" interview run on CBS Sunday night, Ehrlich suggested that a mass extinction — not wholly unlike the one he prophesied would take place in the 1970s but never happened — was under way.
Despite having had the primary claim in his magnum opus proven wrong by real-world trends, Ehrlich doubled down, concluding that the world now faces "too many people, too much consumption, and growth mania."
The biologist's remarks were subsequently denounced and ridiculed, with some critics suggesting that Ehrlich's "anti-human" rhetoric, which helped inspire China's one-child policy resulting in hundreds of millions of abortions, is as dangerous as it is still wrong.
Ehrlich is an American biologist and professor emeritus of population studies at Stanford University. Extra to being a member of the American Philosophical Society and a member of the Royal Society, he also served as a correspondent for NBC News.
Ehrlich told "60 Minutes" that the "rate of extinction is extraordinarily high now and getting higher all the time."
"Humanity is not sustainable," he claimed. "To maintain our lifestyle — yours and mine, basically — for the entire planet, you'd need five more earths. Not clear where they're gonna come from."
The biologist alleged that there are insufficient resources and waning biodiversity, such that "humanity is very busily sitting on a limb that we are sawing off."
In his popular 1968 book "The Population Bomb," Ehrlich suggested that hundreds of millions of people would soon perish from starvation on account of overpopulation.
As one partial remedy, he advocated for coercive population control, such as abortion and birth control, "if voluntary methods fail."
Big Think reported that at the 1974 UN World Population Conference, developing nations rejected coercive proposals to curb the population through eugenicist means, as proposed by Ehrlich, calling such bloody initiatives imperialist.
Ehrlich also predicted that civilization would meet its end in the 1970s; England would disappear by the year 2000; India was doomed; and American life expectancy would drop to 42 years by 1980.
These predictions clearly did not come true.
HumanProgress noted that contrary to Ehrlich's suggestions, the population rose from 3.5 billion in 1968 to 8 billion in 2022; the world produces record amounts of food; the global crude death rate has dropped by approximately 37%; and both London and India are still standing.
While American life expectancy has dropped in recent years, it stands at 76; 34 years higher than that foreseen by Ehrlich.
Scott Pelley, the reporter interviewing Ehrlich for "60 Minutes," conceded that contrary to the biologist's warning of widespread famine, "the green revolution fed the world."
Ostensibly holding out hope that some of Ehrlich's predictions might yet come true, Pelley noted that "he also wrote in '68 that heat from greenhouse gases would melt polar ice and humanity would overwhelm the wild. Today, humans have taken over 70% of the planet's land and 70% of the freshwater."
Researchers recently indicated in the journal Earth System Science Data that, contrary to Ehrlich's suggestion, only 14.6% of lands have been modified by humans across the globe.
A 2020 study suggested that roughly 50% of the earth's surface sees low human influence.
Ehrlich spoke to his evidently unwarranted 20th-century alarmism: "I was alarmed. I am still alarmed. All of my colleagues are alarmed."
This renewed alarmism was not well received.
Andrew Follett, a senior analyst at the Club for Growth, stated, "Ehrlich has simultaneously the worst and most evil track record of any 'intellectual.' He's been consistently wrong about everything forever...and yet his 'ideas' appeal a lot to the elite because they think everyone who isn't them is yucky!"
\u201cCorrect.\n\nEhrlich has simultaneously the worst and most evil track record of any "intellectual."\n\nHe's been consistently wrong about everything forever...and yet his "ideas" appeal a lot to the elite because they think everyone who isn't them is yucky!\u201d— Andrew Follett (@Andrew Follett) 1672693528
Steven Pinker, a Harvard professor and cognitive psychologist, wrote that he was "stunned to see always-wrong Paul Ehrlich softballed as an authority on imminent doom."
Media strategist Gabriella Hoffman tweeted, "Preservationist environmentalism like this poses a grave threat to people and nature. This thinking undergirds most climate alarmism too. Giving credence to Paul Erlich should instill doubt in one's credibility."
Jordan Peterson tweeted, "Paul Ehrlich has been famously wrong about everything he has predicted for six decades."
Twitter CEO Elon Musk responded, "His 'Population Bomb' book might the most damaging anti-human thing ever written."
\u201c@jordanbpeterson His \u201cPopulation Bomb\u201d book might the most damaging anti-human thing ever written\u201d— Dr Jordan B Peterson (@Dr Jordan B Peterson) 1672631714
The Cato Institute's HumanProgress.org underscored how "Paul Ehrlich was wrong in 1968 and he's still wrong now," suggesting that CBS should be ashamed for "leaving his narrative unchallenged."
Marian Tupy, writing in HumanProgress, suggested that this is just the latest instance of "left-leaning media outlets" helping to normalize "their message of anti-humanism and anti-natalism."
William McGurn, the chief speechwriter for former President George W. Bush, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that Ehrlich's "crabbed worldview became an unquestioned orthodoxy for the technocratic class that seems to welcome such scares as an opportunity to boss everyone else around. In this way the missionary fervor once directed toward Christianizing the globe found its late-20th-century expression as proselytizing for population control."
McGurn suggested that "it turns out hell isn’t other people after all. To the contrary, human beings constantly find new and creative ways to take from the earth, increase the bounty for everyone and expand the number of seats at the table of plenty. Which is one reason Paul Ehrlich is himself better off today than he was when he wrote his awful book—notwithstanding all those hundreds of millions of babies born in places like China and India against his wishes."